Boolean bibliometrics and beyond Part 2 LIS 670

Boolean, bibliometrics, and beyond Part 2 LIS 670 donna Bair-Mundy

Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics – a defintion Using quantitative analysis and statistics to examine patterns in academic publishing, now including information transmitted via the World Wide Web

Bibliometrics – what it looks at • Author productivity • Citation analysis – impact factors, indexing • Obsolescence of information resources – half-life of articles • Dispersion of articles in certain fields • Word frequencies

Bibliometrics – Purposes (1) Provide evolutionary models of science, technology, and scholarship Invisible colleges Physics Astrophysics Biophysics Subatomic particle physics Structure of scholarly disciplines Evolution of a discipline over time Evolution of concepts Global warming

Bibliometrics – Purposes (2) Assist development of information retrieval methodologies Provide tools for studying information use and impact Assist in selection and deselection of resources

Properties of scientific literature Fragmentary - each paper contributes a small piece to the puzzle under study Derivative - scientific papers rely heavily on previous research (acknowledged in citations) Edited - peer reviewed by anonymous referees

Evolution of a discipline Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of comparative anatomy—a statistical analysis of the literature • Purpose: "to reduce to geometric form the activities of the corporate body of anatomical research, and the relative importances from time to time of each country and division of the subject" • Looked at 6, 436 publications dealing with animal anatomy for the period 1543 to 1860 Published in: Sci. Progr. 11: 578 -596.

Evolution of a discipline Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of comparative anatomy—a statistical analysis of the literature • When were the periods of greater or less importance; • Where were the centers of activity at any given time? • As the field grew, how and when did it begin to be subdivided into narrower fields? Looking at publications within a field to tell us about the field itself

Evolution of a discipline: IS Harmon, Glynn - 1971 – On the evolution of information science. JASIS 22(4): 235 -241 • Emergence and development of information science • Relationships and roles of information science within potentially emergent suprasystem of knowledge

Science, politics, and economics E. Wyndham Hulme 1923 - Statistical bibliography in relation to the growth of modern civilization First to use the term "statistical bibliography" Purpose: "to ascertain and illustrate by bibliographical data, various stages in the development of the mechanics of civilization" Published by Butler and Tanner Grafton (London)

Hulme (cont’d) Used 13 annual issues of The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, from 1901 to 1913 Counted author entries for various subjects Tabulated number of indexed journals by countries (which countries are highly productive in science? )

Hulme (cont’d) Felt that subject division in a discipline was a sign of growth Concluded that scientific publication output is influenced by population change and political and economic movements

Research output by countries J. Martin van Zyl 2013 – The generalized Pareto distribution fitted to research ouoputs of countries Scientometrics 94(3): 1099 -1109 Which continent (besides Antarctica) is not represented? Why might that be? Why might be the consequences?

Cost of research

Consequences ebola 722 results ebolavirus 984 results aids 122, 722 results hiv 196, 414 results

Author productivity Alfred J. Lotka 1926 - Statistics—the frequency distribution of scientific productivity Purpose: to "determine, if possible, the part which men of different calibre contribute to the progress of science" Looked at Chemical Abstracts Index, then Geschichtstafeln der Physik Published in: J. Washington Acad. Sci. 16: 317 -325.

Lotka's Law The total number of authors y in a given subject, each producing x publications, is inversely proportional to some exponential function n of x.

Lotka's Law - scientific publications Inverse square law of scientific productivity Where: x = number of publications y = number of authors credited with x publications n = constant (equals 2 for scientific subjects) C = constant xn • y = C

No. of authors Lotka's Law - scientific publications xn • y = C

Relative impacts of journals Gross & Gross - 1927 - College libraries and chemical education Purpose: Select appropriate journals for a chemical library to provide good Which journals to education for students collect? Tabulated 3, 633 citations found in the 1926 volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society First use of citation analysis rather than publication counts Published in: Science 66: 385 -389

Relative impacts of journals Journal Citation Reports “JCR is still the only usable tool to rank thousands of scholarly and professional journals. . . ” PETER JACSO

Relative impacts of journals Journal Citation Reports

Citation Indexing Eugene Garfield 1955 - Citation indexes for science: a new dimension in documentation through association of ideas Impact factor Influence of an article based on citations to it Science Citation Index Published in: Science 122: 108 -111.

Problems of indexing The interrelationship between the chemistry and the biological organisms of the soils of Cambodia. 1955 The soil ecology of Kampuchea 1995

Citation matrix citing article cited article citing article citing article

ISI Web of Science (1)

ISI Web of Science (2)

ISI Web of Science (3)

ISI Web of Science (4)

ISI Web of Science (5)

Science Citation Index Association-of-ideas index citing article cited article citing article http: //libweb. hawaii. edu/uhmlib/databases/er_title. html#WEB citing article

Co-citation analysis Articles that cite the same article are likely to both be of interest to the reader of the cited article citing article These two articles are likely to be related

Selecting productive journals Samuel Clement Bradford 1934 - Sources of information on specific subjects Purpose: to develop a means by which librarians could select the most usable periodicals First paper published on observations of scattering Bradford's Law Published in: Engineering 137: 85 -86

Bradford's Law of Scattering (1) "If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, they may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals more particularly devoted to the subject and several groups or zones containing the same number of articles as the nucleus, when the numbers of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be as a : n 2 : n 3 …"

Bradford's Law of Scattering (2) No. of articles per source journals 60 1 3 2 35 30 1 25 2 9 8 4 6 10 5 7 27 5 4 3 5 Total no. of articles 60 130 70 30 50 18 130 32 60 35 130 20 15

Bradford's Law of Scattering (3) 3 sources 130 articles 9 sources 130 articles 27 sources 130 articles

George Kingsley Zipf 1935 The psycho-biology of language: an introduction to dynamic philology Frequency distributions of words Two laws Less frequently occurring words Frequently occurring words Published by MIT Press

Zipf's Law of High Frequency Words Proposed in 1949 by George Kingsley Zipf Where: r = rank (in terms of frequency) f = frequency (no. of times the given word is used in the text) c = constant for the given text r • f=c For a given text the rank of a word multiplied by the frequency is a constant.

Application of Zipf's laws William Goffman - automatic indexing Determine transition point between high- and low-frequency words Collect equal number of words above and below the transition point Eliminate trivial words using stop list Remaining content-bearing words indicate document contents

Obsolescence of resources Charles F. Gosnell 1944 - Obsolescence of books in college libraries Purpose: "to discover lines of trend or curves of distribution by means of which this rate of obsolescence may be expressed in mathematical form" Published in: College Res. Libr. 5: 115 -125

Number of users Curve of obsolescence Age at time of use

Alan Pritchard 1969 Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics? Coined the term "bibliometrics" "the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication" Published in: Journal of Documentation 25(4): 348 -349

Google indexing criteria Text within page being indexed to determine topic Links to page being indexed Anchor text of links to page being indexed (indication of topic) Weight links to page being indexed by links to the linking pages “For a good explanation of Bradford’s Law of Scattering see. . . ”

Google Treating links as citations to compute Page. Rank high-weight linkage low-weight linkage

Citation tree rings represent the citation history of an article. The color of a citation ring denotes the time of corresponding citations. The thickness of a ring is proportional to the number of citations in a given time slice. Chen, C. 2006. Cite. Space II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(3): 359 -3787.

Bibliometrics in Action A time-zone view of mass-extinction research. Chen, C. 2006. Cite. Space II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for

Adding bibliometric visualizations to digital library search results